Please Pardon the Sand in My Eyes

.

One of the more popular cultural myths that falls by the wayside as we grow up is that, when threatened, ostriches bury their heads the sand. Actually, if they can’t escape, they just play dead - or play possum to mix a wildlife metaphor. The “head in the sand” idea being if I can’t see the threat, it can’t see me.  In practice, only humans seem to buy this fallacy.  A couple of ongoing examples spring to mind.  Around the country statues depicting “heroes of the Confederacy” are being torn down occasionally replaced by works more in keeping with our, finally, clearer understanding of the harm done by the glorification of the racist views reflected in these works. The same should be said of the renaming of buildings that were named in honor of such individuals. Having just recently retired from a large public university situated in the old confederacy, I have been following these actions at my own and sister institutions. And I can raise no objections whatsoever to removing these statues and names from their previous places of honor. However, being a firm believer in the old adage “those who do not learn from their history, are inclined to repeat it,” I am concerned about what comes next. 

Given the oft-cited deplorable state of our young people’s knowledge of American history I am concerned that these removals will simply result in “out of sight, out of mind.” And we, and our students, will simply stick our heads back into the muddled sands of time. I shudder to think what the results might be if we questioned students and faculty regarding “Who was the subject of that statue?" and “Why is/was there a statue of them on campus?” “Who was your office building, classroom building, dorm, named after and why?” I am afraid we would be greeted with heads popping out from under the sand, featuring a frightening number of blank stares. Yes, it was Jefferson Davis, but no, he did not play quarterback at Clemson.

It strikes me that we are missing a great teaching opportunity here in the redecoration of our campuses and other public buildings. I’m not sure where these statues are headed, and am sadly aware that their public display could create a rallying spot for misguided hate groups. Nonetheless, I can envision a website - a sort of “Where did they go and why?” place where digital versions of the works could be displayed accompanied by descriptions of the rationale behind the removal of the works or the “decommissioning” of the various buildings. The site could become a valuable resource to be used in various history, art, literature, and western civilization courses.  

We are, after all, supposed to be teaching institutions, and that distinction is being threatened on a number of fronts.  I read with horrified disbelief stories of speakers being “uninvited” from presenting speeches or participating in debates at prestigious campuses because students and faculty have determined, a priori, that they disagree with the perspective advocated by the speaker. Where, if not on college campuses, should the opposing voices of our culture be raised in open debate? Perhaps a small silver lining to the COVID mandated necessity of online courses could be “zoomed debates” among controversial adversaries where disruptions by those who would silence open debate could themselves be silenced. Optional digital sandboxes could be provided for those unwilling to listen to either speaker or speakers. As I pointed out, they would not disturb any ostriches.

.

Schrag PPP Sailing Ship

Hi There -

I won't be sending these this often, but I had been working on this image for a few days and since it was finished I thought I would send it along. As an aside, a couple of friends who had watched me working on these pieces asked, "So what are going to do with those when you are done?"

A strangely insightful question to which I have no final answer. It is obvious, to me anyhow, that I create these images because I find the process "self-affirming." They are the manifestation of the second tenet of Distilled Harmony: Enable Beauty. Or if you prefer the non-BS version: Making them makes me happy.

Right now, sending them out to you seems better than just stacking them up in my home office. I will, I suppose, eventually have to do something with them. "Curating" them in a form that is palatable to you does force me to create versions of the images that I will - I think - allow me, post Covid, to hawk them to some "real" galleries in downtown Chicago, and some online spaces. We'll see.  In the meantime, here is Sailing Ship. [I think if you click on the pics they pop out in a larger format]

This is the original photograph. The ship is located outside the Hotel Saturnia & International in Venice, Italy. I took the shot during our trip there in 2018. Great Spritzs in the bar!

The photo then gets opened in Photoshop where I remove the parts I want to design and color. That leaves me with the image above. I have a couple of options now. I want an image that is 10 or 11 inches square. Too big for any of our home printers, and they would return questionable quality. So I use Staples. I can either send them the file digitally or mask up and take it in on a thumb drive. Either way I end up with the above image on 11x17 heavy stock at a cost of less than 2 bucks! I usually pop for a few. From this point on everything is non-digital, old fashioned drawing.

Next I create the design, drawing it in the white spaces in black marker. That leaves the version above which I color using a variety of markers. Which results in version 1 below.

Version 1.

It is called Version 1 because after living with it a few days I discovered I wasn't really all that fond of it. Too busy, particularly around the sails which seemed to run into each other.

So I went back to the blank white version and redrew the designs a bit and did another version in which I tried to tone down the colors and to darken the edges of the sails so they would 'pop' a bit more. That resulted in Version 2 below.

Version 2

I like this version better. But if I were to do a version 3, I think I would go back and white out the sea below the ship and fool around with trying to make it look a bit more "water-ish."

Schrag Ping Pong Painting: Introduction

I’ve heard that one of the most insidious side effects of the current pandemic is loneliness. Apparently the behaviors that are best for our body - wearing a mask,  washing your hands frequently, using a hand sanitizer, and social distancing - aren’t all that good for our emotions. We get angry, resentful, and as I said, lonely.  It is natural that we turn to our digital tools to attempt to blunt the loneliness. Problematically, much of the chatter going on in digital space seems to be discussing the pandemic or the upcoming elections - discussions or rants that are anything but calming.

I am going to offer an alternative. If you are getting this email you are on the mailing list for Schrag Wall.  I will use that same list to distribute the posts for Schrag PPP.  The PPP stands for Ping Pong Painting, a process that I have chatted about with some of you off The Wall list. The PPP images are my latest take on the second tenet of Distilled Harmony - Enable Beauty.  They are the result of a lifelong negotiation between my love of painting, drawing, photography and the - truth be told- the sad fact that I can’t draw. I have tried, and can keep pace with modestly competent 8 year-olds. But recognizable people, pets or places? Ain’t gonna happen. I will however claim to be a rather accomplished doodler. I mean think about it. I spent years and years sitting in classrooms listening to lectures. What’s a guy to do? Assuming you want to at least appear to be paying attention? You keep your pen moving across the page. You doodle. So when I say I am currently focused on taking photographs that lead to drawings, I really mean I am focused on taking photographs that lead to good spaces for multi-colored doodles.

Briefly, here is the PPP process. I take a photograph. This is the first step in Ping Pong Painting - the serve if you will. 

Next I pull a digital version of the photograph into my computer and open it in Photoshop or Gimp or some other graphics program. I decide what part of the image would make for interesting doodles. I remove that part of the image, leaving a blank space. This is the return of serve.

Next I print out the image - or have Staples print it out for me, as they do a good and inexpensive job of creating this step up to about 11x17 inches. This creates a sort of coloring book version of the photograph - the photograph with my chosen blank spaces.  Volley the return of serve.

Now I fill the blank spaces with black and white doodles.  Again, sort of like coloring book images.  Volley back.

Another volley - I color those portions of the image with markers or pencils or whatever, creating a version of the original photograph whose relationship to the original photograph is somewhat ambiguous. Here is an example that is what you will

see in every Schrag PPP post.

************************

The photograph - AKA the serve.

Here is the original photograph, take in Venice, July 7, 2018

Return of serve. 

The original photograph cropped with the coloring spaces removed. 

Volley.

I am discovering that I don’t always save the various volleys.  Searching them out is rather complicated. I will try to do a better job.

Designs created in the coloring spaces.

Final volley.

Designs painted.

Strange Dreams

.

I understand that the whole COVID social isolation/quarantine thing is having a variety of impacts; mysteriously expanding waistlines, binge viewing of trash TV and all. I, however, am more curious about these strange dreams I have been having. I haven’t come up with a good name to separate them from “weird dreams,” which I have already discussed. These might be a subcategory of weird dreams. Let me explain.

They seem to come in clusters, or bunches. Sort of one after the other. I don’t think I actually wake up between episodes - but I am semi-cognizant of one dream ending and another beginning. I would call them episodic dreams, except that implies that, like a tv series, the dreams were related, same characters, same dominant themes, etc. That is not the case. The content of each of the dreams seem unrelated. Also, the dreams are short. Shorter than short stories, more like little vignettes clipped from a longer narrative. But, as I said, I am left with no clue as to the nature or content of that larger narrative. No doubt I could get a better grasp on this phenomenon were I better able to remember the content of the dreams. I know, I know.  You are supposed to keep a dream journal and, immediately post-dream, write down whatever you can about your dream. However, and this is one of the “strange” bits, while I don’t think I fully wake up between the dreams, I am aware on some level that I am dreaming, and given my current issues with “sleep problems” - which I may have inherited from my older daughter and her older daughter, if that is possible - I am loathe to sacrifice precious sleep to come fully awake and write in a dream journal. So I don’t. My sister and her husband have these watches that track your sleep and show you a graphic representation of waking, sleeping, good sleep, bad sleep, etc. I suppose I could get one, but I’m afraid my graph would look like a pepperoni pizza.

Anyhow, the strangest thing about these mini-dreams is their nebulous relationship to my waking life. I assume we all have repeating categories of dreams that we recognize. In my world of the university, my colleagues often report “dissertation dreams,” in which it is discovered that we never actually finished the damn thing and are summarily either shorn of tenure or dismissed. I have one, perhaps related, in which I am trying to find a location at a convention where I am supposed to deliver a paper. I rush frantically around a huge convention venue with malfunctioning elevators often packed with friends or antagonists from my professional life. They may aid me in my search or lead me astray. I wake from these “genre dreams” exhausted. 

A confusing aspect of the dreams of current concern - mini, cluster, bunch, I still don’t know - is that they have no obvious relationship to either my real world or my “ordinary” dreamworld. Characters, plots, assumed relationships, are all utterly alien, yet seem somehow natural and appropriate. I am toying with the notion that I am pulling the content of these dreams from “somewhere else.” A couple of equally “strange” somewheres suggest themselves. The “many worlds” piece of quantum mechanics posits the notion that whenever we make a significant choice in our lives; career, spouse, location, etc., the alternate worlds that would have resulted from alternate choices go spinning off in other realities - many worlds. Maybe the stuff of these strange dreams is being drawn from those alternate realities. Another idea is one that Buckminster Fuller champions in the introduction to Expanded Cinema by Robert Spahr  (1960) - world-around womb land. This “place” is a sort of universal psychic space that can be accessed by us all, not just the fetal residents of “womb land", would we but pay attention to acquiring the metaphysical skills required, most of which, he seems to imply, are centered in meditation. So, “leakage” from world-around womb land would seem another candidate for the source of these “strange dreams.”

This is the place in a really good essay where the author would pull the various points together into a wise and insightful conclusion. And I would if I could, but I can’t. I guess I just wanted to share, and perhaps inquire as to possibility that you too might be experiencing these strange dreams? But here’s a concluding thought. If I am correct in assuming that these strange dreams are being pulled from “somewhere else,” and if Fuller is right in asserting that meditation plays a significant role in accessing that “other space,” and if the new strange reality of social isolation and self-quarantine brought on by Covid, draws us into spaces more usually accessed via meditation, then maybe the label I am searching for is “Covid dreams.”

.

Morning Song

.

I took Greek as part of my undergraduate language requirement. No, I’m  not really a glutton for punishment. You see, Kalamazoo College required two languages; one Romance, one Classical. I had already used up German as my Romance language and Latin and I had a painful breakup in high school. So I found myself in Professor Poggi’s Greek 100 class, sometime in sophomore year. He was an excellent teacher and shared with us fascinating stories about the satyr dramas, the burlesque entr’actes that stitched together the longer cycles of Greek drama. Like many aspects of my undergraduate career, I wish I had paid closer attention. The point is, I still remember one phrase from the Iliad, or was it the Aeneid? Maybe the Odyssey?  And no I don’t remember the phrase in Greek, but I remember the translation: “the rosy fingered dawn.”

I don’t know what was going on in my life at the time, but somehow that phrase struck deep, and remains at the ready whenever I happen to be awake and attentive when the sky begins to lighten. There is magic in morning, in the feeling of the world made new, before life and memory and obligation drag their muddy feet over the threshold, their dirty prints smearing a path to reality. 

Maybe it is the light, that of the rosy fingers, golden glances, purple clouds sliding into blue, still tinged with crimson, hiding the fading sparkles of starlight and moonglow.

Maybe it is birdsong. The greeting call of the larks gently nudging the notes of the owls, whippoorwills and mockingbirds back into muffled night. Soon the hidden songbirds knit a hallelujah to greet the rising sun, occasionally interrupted by the raucous counterpoint of a murder of crows.

Maybe it is something as simple as the air. Breezes that hint of forests just over the horizon. Of an ocean. The almost forgotten tang of autumn’s burning leaves. A crisp heralding of Winter’s flurries or the gentle reminder of Spring’s lilacs. Summer’s drowsy new mown hay.

Ah, the treasured prints of those rosy fingers of dawn. I do wish I could spend more time in their company - if only they didn't get up so early.

.